Woodstock has the best soundtrack
The Perfect Storm has the worst… The same overbearing, boring, melodramatic phrase repeated over and over and over until you almost wish that whoever wrote the score was on the boat.
I enjoyed the themes from most of the 007 films, especially Live And Let Die & A View To A Kill.
I’m very fond of The Incredibles soundtrack, which is very old-school-cool.
I hated the music from the old Doc Savage movie! It was frikkin John Philip Sousa, dammit! Made it unwatchable.
This is funny, because I was going to post that the Blade Runner soundtrack by Vangelis is one of my very favorites, while the soundtrack from Eyes Wide Shut is one of my absolute least favorites. It made me want to kill. Of course, I didn’t like the movie either, so that probably didn’t help.
She also did the Whale Rider soundtrack. I haven’t heard it or seen the movie, but my brother’s a big fan of her and Dead Can Dance.
The soundtrack for The Last of the Mohicans (Daniel Day Lewis version - “No matter what occurs, I will find you!”) is excellent. Just sublime.
When I was a young tot, I used to watch Hogan’s Heroes on daytime syndicated TV. So The Great Escape lost much of its impact when they used the exact same song. I know that the movie probably came first, but Steve McQueen trying to escape on his motorcycle and running into the barbwire fence loses a lot of punch when you’re hearing bouncy notes and thinking, “I see nothink!” So a not so good one there for me.
I’ve always wondered where they got the generic action music for The Black Hole.The main theme puts me to sleep also.
{b]The Blues Brothers**–Dan Ackroyd’s Stand By Your Man is worth the price of the entire CD.
Me, I love Bernard Hermann’s scores. He did a bunch of Alfred Hitchcock (including North by Northwest and Psycho and Ray Harryhausen (Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts) and other larger-than-life flicks (Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Stillink he did Citizen Kane
I love the opening James Horner did for The Rocketeer.
The musical portions of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and of Team America: World Police totally make the movies. Trey Parker is a musical genius, however twisted.
My favorite soundtracks (for non-musical films):
Henry V, Patrick Doyle
The Piano, Michael Nyman
Schindler’s List, John Williams
Chariots of Fire, Vangelis
Lawrence of Arabia, Maurice Jarre
Much Ado About Nothing, Patrick Doyle
Braveheart, James Horner
Romeo and Juliet, Nino Rota
As far as worst soundtrack, I add my voice to the chorus of boos for Ladyhawk.
Oh, yeah, how could I forget – I love John Williams, too. I’ve got a collection of his stuff on CD. Even if he is immensely popular, his stuff is great.
One soundtrack I like that most other people hate is Giorgiou Moroder’s for his restoration of Metropolis. There ar theaters in the Boston area that showed that film with the volume off, substituting their own soundtrack, or a live orchestra. But i love it. So , apparentrly, do some other social misfits – there’s a website devoted to it. To my extreme ire, the commercially-available soundtrack recording does not use the same versions actually used in the movie.
My least favorite soundtrack is one of my greatest disappointments. I’m a big Rick Wakeman fan. For years I wanted to make my own soundtrack for my copy of the silent Phantom of the Opera, because every version I’d heard was awful. One of the centerpieces would be “Judas Iscariot” from Rick Wakeman’s Criminal Record, because it sounds like the creation of a psychotic organist. Far better than the overused Back Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor, which doesn’t deserve its reputatioon as the trademark piece favored by mad organists.
So when I passed an art theater and saw that they were goinmg to show The Phantom of the Opera with a new electronic score by Rick Wakeman, my heart stopped. I had to see (and hear ) it.
It was…AWFUL. Worst soundtrack I ever heard, but made infinitely worse because my expectations were so high. Jeez – Wakeman had already done creditable soundtracks for Lisztomania and White Rock. How could he screw up so royally?
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Aaahaaaahahahahhhhhh…waaa waaa waaaa…
A true classic that defined an entire genre of film.
Harry Manfredini was a staple of the 80’s horror movies, including incredibly brilliant and memorable scores for House and Friday the 13th. House especially is some of the creepiest music I’ve ever listened to.
John Carpenter has also written some great scores, Halloween being the most recognized.
The most recent movie I saw with a score that really impressed me was Solaris (the Soderbergh version). Cliff Martinez did the score, and while a lot of it sounds like a more tonal Ligeti (maybe influenced by all that Ligeti in 2001), he did a great job with it.
I had long known, on an intellectual level, that Bernard Hermann did many of Hitchcock’s scores. In a parallel part of my brain, I was extremely familiar with the score for Jason and the Argonauts – it was a favorite of my kids, and we watched it often. But I never connected the two until watching North by Northwest recently – and there’s a scene (on Mt. Rushmore, IIRC) where I went “hey…sounds just like Jason & the Argonauts!” So I pulled out my copy of J&theA, checked the box…and ta da! There was Bernard Hermann’s name. Gave myself double brownie points.
The first great soundtrack that comes to my mind is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. Anderson uses music to great effect especially when introducing characters, such as the scenes featuring Mama Told Me Not To Come and Driver’s Seat.
Scorsese’s Goodfellas (the scene with the coda to Layla, especially) and Casino have soundtracks that are integral to the movie.
All three of these movies are similar in that years pass from the beginning to the end of the film, and the music helps place the on-screen happenings in historical context.